on voip.ms you can pick the area code you want or port your current number.

Yes, and so can CallCentric, Anveo, and several others for a large part of Canada - and all of these providers are frequently mentioned in VoIP Tech Chat forum.

But the point I was making is that when you get to smaller cities such as Kingston and Cornwall, and even smaller communities such as mine, THAT's where every one of Vonage, Primus, Skype, and MagicJerk (all of which brag about being established VoIP providers to Canada) falls short.

Most providers have locale choices for your number(s) including international. Your choice where and how many you want. If you have someone like a mother or customer that you'd like to give a local number to for calling you that's another nice feature. Toll free, all kinds of options. At around $1/mth for each CID that's a good deal.

Nothing stops you from using multiple providers if one has a location for CID that you want and another doesn't. With SIP URL (most of the decent companies have that) you can pass calls between providers at little or no cost so your phone only needs to connect to one.

Lots of fun tricks. Just for fun I built a PBX out of a Raspberry Pi ($35 computer board). it isn't my usual PBX since I already one but it works well enough to run a house full of users.

I have TekTalk as main line and now two voip.ms lines. Both work ok, there have been times TekTalk been down, i find voip.ms more reliable. Two reasons while i'm still with TekTalk-- voip.ms did not work with alarm system, tektalk did and included free incoming/outgoing local calls. One more odd thing, if sometimes goes wrong with internet, tektalk will take long time to reconnect, .ms right away, within seconds. I have been thru all settings with teksavvy tech and they weren't able to fix it either.

Yeah there's a lot of options and things that can go right and wrong. I think the OP only wants a phone line that acts like POTS but we can still geek out a bit.

Having your own PBX on a low power device is tons of fun and you can build your own failover schemes. The no cost incoming is nice if you get a lot of calls but what's nice about voip.ms et al is that paying for every call can work out really cheap. $5/mth with some bells and whistles. I have more ways to contact me than I get actual calls. I still keep an old Nokia N800 as a house phone and it works fantastic. And the SIP enabled smart phone, and a cordless, etc....

to the OP, with a standards based SIP account you can do things like add SIP to your smart phone and never call long distance over your voice plan.